March/April 2002

Moving toward integration with "real yoga" 
An interview with Yogi Amrit Desai

By Ravi Dykema

Yogi Amrit Desai, the originator of Kripalu yoga, is widely acknowledged for carrying an authentic and traditional practice of yoga to the West. He began teaching yoga in 1960 and became one of the earliest pioneers of yoga in the United States. Since then, he has been honored with the titles of doctor of yoga, Jagadacharya (universal teacher) and Vishwa Yoga Ratna by the president of India. Following a life-changing kundalini awakening, Desai developed a method of yoga that incorporated a spiritual dimension to the practice of hatha yoga, naming it Kripalu yoga in honor of his guru. He founded the Kripalu Yoga Fellowship in 1966 in Pennsylvania and in 1983, moved the center to Lenox, Massachusetts. Kripalu became one of the largest yoga centers in the United States. Desai resigned as spiritual director of Kripalu in 1994, amid controversy.

      His current model of teaching, called Amrit yoga, was designed to create unity between the physical, mental and emotional bodies by harnessing and directing their scattered energies. Here, Desai talks to Nexus publisher Ravi Dykema about the spiritual aspects of yoga, the integration of the body and the practice of living consciously.

RD: You're revered as a master of yoga, and your viewpoint on yoga is broader than most. When you are asked, "What is yoga," what do you say?

AD: First of all, the purpose of the practice of yoga and the meaning of the word yoga is "integration" or "union." When yoga becomes body bound, practiced exclusively at the physical level, it misses something vital. If you are practicing yoga, it must include not only the physical body, but the mental and emotional bodies as well. Without meditative awareness, there is no integration. I have integrated inward focus and meditative awareness with hatha yoga postures, which allows people to engage not only the physical body, but also the mental and emotional bodies. That is where the integration happens.

This practice is done in stages. In the first stage, people focus their attention on the posture, trying to find precision and correctness of the form. When you deliberately learn how to do a posture correctly, that leads you to a willful stage, and that helps you break through old conditioning. Some people will practice certain postures and consistently avoid others. Some people will avoid doing postures correctly. In order to overcome these unconscious boundaries, you must practice an inward focus. You begin watching yourself when you are doing yoga postures, noticing what kind of resistances are coming up, what kind of fears are coming up, what kind of comments are coming up in your mind. When you pay attention to what's coming up, you learn not to buy in to your pre-programmed self-concepts as to what you can and cannot do. If you let go of the dialogue in your mind, let go of your fears, and you allow yourself to enter your body, you'll find out that you have much more flexibility than you would have if you were to force yourself into a posture.

Every boundary you encounter that looks like a physical boundary has self-concepts or fear built into it. The whole idea of yoga practice is to break your self-concepts. When you practice meditative awareness, you let go of the dialogue: the thoughts of fear, comparing yourself to others, self-criticism. In the yoga I have developed, you learn how to establish your mind in bodily sensations, instead of fighting with the mind. So, during the practice of yoga posture, you are observing. After you have learned how to do the yoga postures correctly, you then learn how to prolong the holding of the posture. And when you prolong the holding, you will eventually come to a boundary where you think you can't go any further.

But that boundary is not just physical, it's also fear. So you relax, breathe and let go of wondering whether you can or cannot hold the posture. Instead, you go directly to the body and enter deeper, using breath, without forcing. That's the way of consciousness-you are penetrating those boundaries, not forcefully, but consciously. People with a body centered practice usually use force to overcome physical boundaries. They do not realize those boundaries live in the mind, in the form of fears, self-concepts and belief systems.

 

RD:  If someone did use force to overcome those boundaries, what would you guess would be the outcome?

AD:  They will progress and become more flexible. They will have physical benefits, and they will cross that boundary, but they will not change their personality. Purely physical activity changes your chemistry-your whole system becomes oxygenated, your blood becomes pure, and you will feel better, more alert and vital. All those changes will be there. But you won't change your personality. World class athletes have overcome tremendous physical boundaries, but have not necessarily changed their personalities. Negative self-concepts and belief systems don't just go away if you work hard, but they do if you work consciously.

 

RD:  But most people now are approaching yoga without a particular interest in changing their personality-they may not even know that yoga practice has that capacity.

AD:  Yes, and that is good. Once they get started on that path, they will find some miraculous results, even just doing physical practice. I'm not against a physical practice. I'm just saying there is more to it. At Kripalu, I introduced many different kinds of yoga. We had Bikram and Iyengar and many others, because I respect all approaches to yoga. But I still say there is something more to it, and people are starting to realize that. People are hungry to know what the real yoga does.

 

RD:  How could "real" yoga, as you call it, contribute to the West? What would that take?

AD:  I think yoga has already contributed. It begins with physical exercise, then the next step of consciousness naturally happens. For example, I'll just teach yoga and never talk about diet, and when my students become involved in the practice, they automatically find they're eating too much meat or have a toxic way of life. Most people who begin yoga as a purely physical practice eventually find there is more to it. They get bored with the physical postures in a way, because how much can you really exercise? And where can you go with it? Eventually, you have to find a new way of engaging yourself.

More and more people who have studied psychology and spirituality and religions, and who are truly interested in their personal growth, are discovering this new approach to yoga. For me, I didn't know about that yoga myself. I started teaching yoga in 1960 when I first came to America, and there were hardly any yoga classes then. Very little was known about it. At that time, I was teaching the spirituality of yoga as well. But then one day, in 1970, I was practicing yoga with my wife and two students, and in the midst of guiding them, I saw my kundalini shakti (an energy in one's body that is usually dormant) awaken. And it just started engaging my body into doing postures automatically. Before then, I had no shakti experience. This was the first stage of kundalini awakening. I didn't know what had happened, so I wrote to my guru, and he said it was the result of mild shaktipat (an infusion of spiritual energy, or shakti, from a spiritual master) he had given me, unknown to me. And he said, "I chose not to tell you, because if I told you, you would have kept it in your mind and expected that." During that time, I found a whole new dimension of yoga that I didn't know before.

At that time, I had already trained 50 yoga teachers, and I had started the Yoga Society of Pennsylvania, and we had 150 yoga classes. I had also received a doctorate of yoga. And after this experience, I had found out that I did not know real yoga.

 

RD:  You have said that you had a model of yoga that was shattered. What was the model you were working from before your shakti experience?

AD:  I was doing internal focus, but I had not integrated the principles that would take you to ecstatic unity while you were doing postures. During this shakti experience, I entered into a state which I later described as "meditation in motion." That means there was dynamic stillness, which most people do not understand. It is a paradox-how could you be dynamic and be still? How could you be in meditation and in motion?

I was deeply engaged, so engaged that I lost all sense of time. Everything outside disappeared. I didn't even remember what postures I did. In the beginning, I did remember that I was doing postures that we had never seen in any book on yoga, and it was all guided by internal promptings and the guidance of my body. Sometimes, when we have been sitting too long, we just twist, and that's the body telling you to move a certain way. That's how the whole experience was. I found myself going deeper and deeper into that experience, and eventually when I stopped, I found myself so still, it was hard to even open my eyes. The three people who were supposed to be doing yoga with me didn't know what was happening to me. But my state was so deep, that they themselves went into deep meditation just watching me.

 

RD:  You mentioned that you are working on developing a spiritual dimension to hatha yoga. Does classical hatha yoga not contain a spiritual dimension?

AD:  It has a spiritual dimension. Classical hatha yoga is actually an integral part of ashtanga yoga. Ashtanga means eight-limbed yoga. Patanjali called it eight-limbed yoga; he didn't call it eight-step yoga. In other words, this yoga is not supposed to be practiced one step at a time. Even though one limb may be predominant, all other limbs are in harmony with it. If you want to walk this path, you have to walk with all the limbs.

Any practice of yoga must have all of the components simultaneously present-you cannot do hatha yoga with the body and ignore what the mind is doing and still call it yoga-concentration is very much an integral part of yoga. When you have an emotional reaction while you are doing hatha yoga, when you have doubt or are rejecting or judging yourself while you're doing yoga, you are practicing conflict-on a yoga mat and calling it yoga! That's not yoga. That's practice of conflict in the name of yoga.

This practice I have developed is an integration of all eight limbs of yoga. Even though it is predominantly physical, it has all the other components. Yoga means "union." Union of what? Body, mind, heart and soul. It means they are all harmoniously in procreation of whatever your intention is, and your intention in the practice of yoga is attaining union. How can you attain union with your body alone and let your mind function unconsciously? It's like five people sitting in a boat, each one with a different agenda, a different direction in mind. And they start rowing, each one putting his oars into the water and paddling in different directions. The boat will go in circles.

 

RD:  Do you view your creation of Amrit yoga as a stream consistent with the way yoga has develop, a continuation of an ancient tradition?

AD:  It complies completely with ancient tradition. The only new thing is that I have incorporated the practice of all those principles of the eight-limbed path into hatha yoga. A strong yoga practice of yama and niyama sets the spiritual tone of the successful practice of hatha yoga. The meaning of hatha yoga is the union of "ha" and "tha." "Ha" means sun, and "tha" means moon. The sun and the moon uniting symbolizes the duality into unity. And when the sun and the moon unite, the energy moves through shushumna, the central canal of the body. That marks the successful practice of hatha yoga, and that is spiritual, the reunion in the midst of multiplicity, from many to two, and from two to one. It's also a reverse process. From God, the one, comes two, the male and female principle. From that, multitude forms are created. So the whole of creation comes out of this male and female principle. And that's the principle you integrate.

 

RD:  What is your perspective on how one deals with emotions, especially through the practice of yoga?

AD:  Instead of emotions, what I say is "reactions." Many actions are really pre-programmed, unresolved past experiences that have been lodged in the unconscious. Through specific triggers and situations, they are brought back to our conscious memory.

 

RD:  Could you give me an example?

AD:  Suppose a child is abused by a father or authority figure. When he goes to school, he meets another authority figure that will trigger a reaction in the child, just by looking at that authority figure. Other children don't have an issue with that person. But this child reacts with an old memory of feeling abused by an authority figure. So that's called "re-action." Almost all emotional reactions are re-activated, pre-programmed past experiences.

 

RD: But then they also come up, don't they, when someone breathes more deeply?

AD:  That's the idea. The purpose of yogic disciplines is to bring all these experiences to the surface and learn how to interact with them consciously. When we interact with reaction consciously, we do not express our reaction or suppress our reaction. Instead, we experience the event that was incomplete. Most people do not want to do this. Therefore they cannot process it correctly and go beyond it. What happens in this situation is an automatic response, where you tap into anger energy, survival energy from the first chakra, that you've held in reserve to protect yourself. It's a knee-jerk reaction.

The question is, how can we transform that shadow energy, that unconscious energy, into light energy? When that shadow energy comes up, how do you recognize it's a shadow energy? When you have an emotional reaction, it then produces mental dialogues and pictures that are inconsistent with what's really happening at that moment. When there is inconsistency, there is conflict and lack of union. Yoga can help create unity in that situation.

When you react, one of two things naturally happens: you fight or you flee. Those are the instinctive reactions. But there is a third option, a spiritual instead of instinctive, animal option: that is to feel everything, to convert the whole dark shadow energy into light energy. This can happen only if you allow yourself to feel completely first.

What compromises feeling? Not being fully in the experience. If I blame you for my unhappiness, I can't feel it. If I blame myself and make myself feel guilty, I can't feel it. When I do neither of those, I can feel an experience. I can live through that experience that was incomplete in the past, and complete it now. How? By leaving it completely, having no residual anger, fear, self-judgment, blame, shame or guilt. When you go through that process, then you can work that energy that was held in reserve, that was being used to prevent that painful reaction from occurring again. That energy then becomes available for deliberate action, instead of unconscious behavior guided by preconditioned belief systems, personal biases, fears, anger, jealousy and hatred. It is one of the paths to more conscious living.